Read an Excerpt

FOREWORD: A Cabinet that Holds the World

We, as collectors, serve as guardians of a language or a past in order to secure a future. No piece of art in a collection belongs to those that hold it. It belongs to the world and its life will invariably outlast our own.

That said, our curation often becomes self-portraiture. As custodians of images, we define our own view of the world. Thus, the Korshak Collection is not only one of the most important fantastic art collections in the world, but also a window into Stephen Korshak’s soul, and the souls of his family before him, and their longing for the sublime, the bizarre, and the extraordinary.

The essays in this book tackle the artists and inventory featured in the collection with su≈cient attention that I need not repeat the details here, but I would like to expand on the advantages of holding a collection, a cabinet of curiosities of sorts: collecting became an art in and of itself as the world inched its way toward enlightenment. Travel was di≈cult and the world was full of mystery, so few brave explorers—or warriors—ventured beyond and carried home intriguing traces of creatures and places. One could imagine what laid beyond the mists—faraway lands where cyclopes roamed the land in search of human flesh and roc birds nested in islands full of precious stones. ...

It is said that the first organization of the great museums was simply done to organize the spoils of war. Art was parceled and divided according to the time and place of acquisition and creation: Egyptian Art, Renaissance Art, Flemish Art, etc. Soon, the spoils of war revealed an unexpected, hitherto unknown, aesthetic and sense of self amongst collectors that revealed chronology and national identity and influenced artists across the globe. And in these explorers’ collections, fantasy and reality collided—narwal horns and elephant heads became avatars for a zoology of invention, and coral and nautilus shells laid side by side with pygmy skulls or Hands of Glory. The collection of Japanese and Egyptian art helped many European artists to reformulate their own aesthetic and philosophical approach to image-making and to reenvisioning the world through the eyes of others.

Fantastic art, then, carries the breeze from an impossible ocean shore—it liberates us not only of geography and chronology but of the mundane and the rational. The marriage of new forms, new architecture, and newly discovered biology gives us hope in the fact that, perhaps, we are not limited by the vulgarity of our lives. We can represent larger realities and concepts, tackle the cosmology of fairy tales about the very foundational myths and concepts that constitute the language of what we are, not only who we are. The divine and eternal, the numinous and uncanny lie side by side in the images on these pages, and we have the privilege of walking the corridors of their artists’ minds while holding the hand of an expert guide, a man that knows that the first act of love is to hold, and the second one is to share.

Indeed, I collect and study many of the very same subjects the Korshak Collection has enshrined and preserved, so I am grateful to have the collection as a resource. The most beautiful thing is to encounter a collection that almost perfectly mirrors your own or, simply put, is a mirror that becomes a window to a landscape, known and new at the same time.

The Korshak Collection is a portrait and biography of a man and his family, who once looked upon the dark skies and saw Immortals, gods hunting in the storm clouds. Stephen Korshak decided to dedicate his life to tell us all how the thunder sounded and preserve the outlines of the cosmos for the awe of us all.

Enjoy, believe—be amazed.

Guillermo del Toro
Los Angeles, California
2025